Build status

Introduction

RapidJSON is a JSON parser and generator for C++. It was inspired by RapidXml.

RapidJSON is small but complete. It supports both SAX and DOM style API. The SAX parser is only a half thousand lines of code.

RapidJSON is fast. Its performance can be comparable to strlen(). It also optionally supports SSE2/SSE4.2 for acceleration.

RapidJSON is self-contained and header-only. It does not depend on external libraries such as BOOST. It even does not depend on STL.

RapidJSON is memory-friendly. Each JSON value occupies exactly 16 bytes for most 32/64-bit machines (excluding text string). By default it uses a fast memory allocator, and the parser allocates memory compactly during parsing.

RapidJSON is Unicode-friendly. It supports UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 (LE & BE), and their detection, validation and transcoding internally. For example, you can read a UTF-8 file and let RapidJSON transcode the JSON strings into UTF-16 in the DOM. It also supports surrogates and “\u0000” (null character).

JSON(JavaScript Object Notation) is a light-weight data exchange format. RapidJSON should be in full compliance with RFC7159/ECMA-404, with optional support of relaxed syntax. More information about JSON can be obtained at

Change to build directory and run cmake .. command to configure your build. Windows users can do the same with cmake-gui application.

On Windows, build the solution found in the build directory. On Linux, run make from the build directory.

On successful build you will find compiled test and example binaries in bin directory. The generated documentation will be available in doc/html directory of the build tree. To run tests after finished build please run make test or ctest from your build tree. You can get detailed output using ctest -V command.

It is possible to install library system-wide by running make install command from the build tree with administrative privileges. This will install all files according to system preferences. Once RapidJSON is installed, it is possible to use it from other CMake projects by adding find_package(RapidJSON) line to your CMakeLists.txt.

Usage at a glance

This simple example parses a JSON string into a document (DOM), make a simple modification of the DOM, and finally stringify the DOM to a JSON string.